The good news continues. On Friday I spoke to our local NHS and council chiefs who confirmed that infection rates continue to decline in all age groups; overall we have now had three weeks of consecutive daily decreases in new cases. The hospitals are under less pressure than our last update two weeks ago, although Intensive Care Units are still running very hot. We must continue to hold in our thoughts the heroic and traumatic work that NHS staff are doing every day - and play our part in hastening the end of this pandemic.
The astonishing success (astonishing because, let’s face it, official programmes haven’t all gone brilliantly during this crisis) of the vaccine roll-out means that the UK should be socialising and trading again within months. I’ve been giving some thought to my own priorities as we emerge from the shadow of Covid-19. If you read my newsletters you’ll know I have been inspired by the strength of local communities during the lockdown, and am convinced that we need to build on this in future. We need to create a more local, more sustainable, less centralised, less bureaucratic economy and society.
I spoke about this in a speech to the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London last week, as part of their series looking at the economy we need post-Covid. And I have been finalising a paper on reform of social care, to be published by Demos later this month, that argues for a more human, more generous system for looking after older people. I also spoke briefly in the Commons last week to press the Ministry of Justice to include small charities and social enterprises in the provision of rehabilitation services (see here).
A perfect example of the future economy I think we need is the ambition of the community of Ogbourne St Andrew and thereabouts to save the Silks on the Downs pub - closed since last year - by buying it and running it as a social enterprise. Local people are invited to take shares in the business, which will continue as a gastro-pub but also run events and support local community projects. There’s a write-up in the local paper here, and if you’d like to know more do contact info@savethesilks.org.
I was delighted last week to open (via zoom of course - one day I will actually meet another human being in the flesh again) the St James Centre, a new institution across the road from St James’s Church in Devizes. St James’s was the kernel of the incredible community response to the first lockdown - hundreds of volunteers organising support for isolating and shielding people - and the new Centre will enable them to provide more sustained support the town and, as they put it, to ‘help everyone flourish’. You can watch the launch event here.
Speaking of inspirations, I had the pleasure this week of awarding, on behalf of the Prime Minister, a Points of Light award to the brilliant Carmela Chillery-Watson, age six. Carmela has muscular dystrophy and she has raised over £50,000 for Muscular Dystrophy UK by some incredible feats - including walking, on her crutches, the equivalent of a marathon over a month in 2019. Do check her posts which include a daily fitness challenge. My congratulations and thanks to her and her mother Lucy.
The Ogbournes, says John Chandler, are best appreciated from the ramparts of Barbury Castle. ‘The palimpsest before you, of bronze age fields overlain by medieval lynchets, then nibbled away by Victorian agricultural ‘improvers’, and largely flattened by modern agribusiness, is a familiar one from many downland vantage points.’ In 1830 across England agricultural labourers rose in revolt against low prices, landlordism, and the coming age of machines, and a particularly violent confrontation took place here in the Ogbournes, at Rockley Manor House. Yet through all this history there is surely some vein of continuity, and that is the hard living wrested from thin soil, and the common stewardship of this great lonely landscape.
I hope that, with a better farm support system than the one just ending, and enterprises like the Silks community pub business, another layer to the palimpsest can be added, and a good future made for this district. In the churchyard at Ogbourne St Andrew is the gravestone of the blind vicar Henry Cawardine (died 109) with the the simple text from St John’s gospel: ‘Now I see’.